No.51 - September 2021
I’ve been thinking about Negative Capability lately, thanks to an irritated friend (her adjective) who shall be introduced shortly. For many years I sort of vaguely endorsed Keats’s famous put-down of hyper-rationalism without putting much thought into it. Then suddenly found myself wondering if perhaps I don’t know what to think about it at all. As most will remember, Keats was always tossing off resonant and quotable propositions about poetry in his lively letters, but seldom developing or illustrating them too fully. These much-quoted nuggets are typically sandwiched between news of his social life and gossip about mutual acquaintances. They’re far from being fully realized essays. As a result, readers have been busy interpreting and extrapolating what he meant for two centuries.
Before proceeding further, I’d best remind myself and you just what Keats wrote, in an 1817 letter to his brothers George and Tom. In the process of describing a “disquisition” he had had with an acquaintance, he reports:
And that’s about it for his theory. (By the way, speaking of irritations, rather than putting a “[sic]” after every time Keats employs the generic “Man,” I invite you to imagine a word like “Person” in its place.)
Scholars have pointed out that this renowned passage seems to connect with an idea Keats had floated in an earlier letter, to the effect that “Men of Genius” (as opposed to “Men of Power”) are distinguished by their lack of “individuality” and “any determined Character.” That’s where Shakespeare comes in, as the ultimate genius. Why? For erasing his own individuality in favor of that of his characters. These characters speak often with eloquence and force, but we have little idea what their author truly thought about the ideas that they explore. In his plays, via his fictional creations, Shakespeare certainly expresses mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts as well as any author ever has, but he nowhere articulates settled opinions of his own. I take it that this is part of what Keats means when he asserts that for a great poet “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” Hamlet or Macbeth may be psychological or moral messes, and their tragedies don’t convey any clear “message,” much less an uplifting one. Yet the plays bearing their names are sheer Beauty. It is a highly Romantic attitude, obviously, this foregrounding of the aesthetic and intuitive over all matters practical, logical, and systematic—which “men of power” presumably excel at.
Like most either/or formulations, this polarity between Genius and Power seems a big oversimplification. But I confess that to the extent that I lean in one direction, I have always found the Romantic side of the aisle more comfortable than its opposite. In other words, I’m with Keats, Whitman, and other Romantic poets in finding the world around me rich in mystery, uncertainty, and doubt. I feel the deep attractions of dream, intuition, myth, emotional intelligence, and so on, while being skeptical that reason and logic alone can take us where we need to go. For a poem is not primarily an essay or an argument but a work of art. Accordingly I believe that contradiction and ambiguity and ambivalence are frequently required in order to do justice in a poem to the messy complexities of any self-aware, honest reckoning. In this regard, I’ve frequently quoted my favorite definition of poetry, Auden’s “clear expression of mixed feelings.” That’s not the whole story, by a long shot, but it does point to a quality I deeply admire in much of the poetry I love most, Keats’s definitely included.
Reason itself is not necessarily very good at addressing some crucial matters of moral or emotional intelligence, is it? After all, it was the Age of Reason that inspired our founding fathers to adopt high-minded positions about Natural Rights, Freedom, and Liberty, while at the same time allowing them to use rational arguments to reconcile such lofty notions with their continued support of slavery, Native American genocide, and male supremacy. Such patriots and enlightened thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and even Benjamin Franklin were slave owners. Pure emotion can be unhinged and confusing, to be sure, but pure reason can be heartless. That may be an oversimplification, but one containing more than a kernel of truth.
So to the extent that I gave it much thought, for a long time I believed that at least part of Keats’s skepticism about “facts and reason” was quite sensible, having to do with the inherent limitations of rationalism and utilitarian philosophy. And realizing that there is something beyond the purely rational in any art I have ever deeply loved.
Then along came my friend Marilyn McCabe, who has written a couple astringent blog posts on the subject of Negative Capability, which quite usefully plunged me into new uncertainties and doubts, while prodding me to take a fresh look at some of the mysteries I’ve largely taken for granted.
McCabe’s blog, which you should follow if you don’t already (find it here: marilynonaroll.wordpress.com), regularly offers brief, provocative ruminations on poetry, art, and creativity, all expressed with her trademark humor and attitude. The title of a post from 25 July 2016 puts her thesis on Negative Capability in a nifty nutshell: “Keats Pisses Me Off; or the Beauty of Fact and Reason; or Art and Reaching, Irritably.” That’s pretty clear. The entire post is brief enough that I can quote a good chunk of what she writes in developing her point:
I’m embarrassed to admit that it hadn’t occurred to me until reading this that Keats’s praise of uncertainty and confusion is itself a bit confusingly presented, as well as radically undeveloped. And worse, that his take-down of hyper-rationality is expressed, however incompletely, in the bloodless language of rationality, not poetry. I mean, for heaven’s sake, Negative Capability—it’s as bad as Categorical Imperative, an abstract mouthful such as would intimidate any freshman in Philosophy 101. It also seems to present an irreconcilable paradox, akin to William Carlos Williams’s famous slogan, “No ideas but in things”—which, as everyone has gleefully pointed out, is an idea, not a thing. Just as Archibald MacLeish’s patronizing imperative “A poem should not mean, / but be,” in his “Ars Poetica,” is likewise self-contradictory.
So for the first time I want to ask, “John, aside from ‘not reaching irritably,’ what should I do with my uncertainties and doubts? Help!” In other words, McCabe has a good point. And as she continues I begin to see my own understanding start to clarify a bit:
I agree wholeheartedly, except for the last several sentences, where I must qualify my agreements. By the way, my problem isn’t the expletives. I personally love Keats and would never tell him to fuck off, but it’s fun to challenge hero worship and knock the icons off their pedestals. Besides, his finest poems can survive any amount of his loose epistolary philosophizing. Keats remains a great poet not because of his critical theories, such as they are, but because he wrote superb poems.
Still, I believe where McCabe is headed here may provide an answer to my own belated question of Keats: what should I do with my mistrust of overly tidy rationalism? The more I think about it, the more I suspect it is not only the best answer, but perhaps the only sensible one. What we do is keep asking questions, considering every poem as an experiment, and every conclusion provisional. I suspect McCabe might concur with me on that. If this reminds anyone of the scientific method, I would agree; poetic and scientific creation share a lot. “The reaching is the art” chimes nicely with something the great Czech poet Miroslav Holub once wrote. Holub, who was a distinguished immunologist in addition to a poet, described the following lines as one of the few occasions in which he succeeded in conveying something about his laboratory life in a poem:
The phrase of McCabe’s I do have some trouble with is “writing a poem IS an act of reaching after fact and reason.” That way of putting it seems to me incomplete, and not a good fit with much of my own reading or practice. Of course, I should also mention that I realize her comments come from a blog post, which is by definition as exploratory as Keats’s letters. Her comments were not meant as a dissertation. Still, let me try to flesh out what I mean by way of an example or two.
The reason I don’t recognize my poetic self in “reaching after fact and reason” is because reason itself is seldom (never?) my own goal. It certainly may be one of the tools employed, along with my knowledge of poetic craft and history, and of course the countless facts supplied by my experience and reading. When I’ve tried to capsulize my sense of what my goal in writing a poem is, my best (oversimplified) nutshell is “surprise.” This is a topic I covered at some length in the May issue of this year in The Garment of Surprise. Typically when writing a poem I hope to go somewhere, imaginatively, where I have not yet been, explore some new psychic or emotional territories, or possibly just find some musical tones that I haven’t yet sounded.
While I do assuredly believe in objective reality, honor the scientific method, and appreciate it when poems are grounded in factual details, I think the mansion of poetry contains many other rooms. The issue here was nicely expressed by Whitman in his original 1855 version of “Song of Myself”:
Yes, Whitman, that arch-Romantic and Transcendentalist, was also a lover of science. In fact he relished all things modern, writing poems in praise of locomotives, photography, and other fruits of 19th Century progress. He didn’t simply emote or philosophize; and more importantly, he saw no real division between fact and spirit, body and soul, science and art. He famously boasted of his own “contradictions,” many of which I am tempted to say are shared with most of us.
Thus in the same passage he can segue directly from his paean to “positive science” and “exact demonstration” to this necessary qualification, addressed to the chemists, grammarians, surgeons, geologists and other lovers of fact and reason:
This combination gets close to my own feelings on the subject. The facts are useful indeed, and of course real, but “they are not my dwelling.” Not in a poem, anyway. Ideally, my own poetic dwelling contains and builds on facts and reason, but may also contain dream, mystery, intuition, and when necessary paradox, contradiction, ambivalence, and so on. Why? Simply because that’s life, to put it as reductively as Keats did.
I like Frost’s summary of his aim for poems, which was to achieve “a momentary stay against confusion.” His explanation in “The Figure a Poem Makes” of how a poem comes to be is worth quoting more fully:
I hope this does not seem like mere hair-splitting, but when writing a poem I am not reaching after fact and reason, per se; rather, I am inclining to the impulse, following my intuitive instincts, and hoping for that momentary stay against confusion. A great many drafts, in fact most of them, do not succeed in achieving that, but it remains my goal.
The same seems true of many of the poems by others that I love most. I have learned many things from reading poems, including all sorts of wonderful facts. But the ones that strike me most deeply typically leave some loose ends, some ambiguity or ambivalence, some question, even some mystery. This is true even of some very short and simple poems, ones I would not argue are masterpieces, but which do seem to be ones that Keats, Whitman, or Frost might appreciate. I’ll conclude with a simple one by William Stafford that is short enough to look at whole:
Nothing unclear about this odd little love poem, certainly. The vocabulary is simple, images deliberately generic, descriptive details sparsely deployed. The tone itself, with maybe one exception, befits the theme by remaining flat as Kansas. (Those who heard the late poet give a reading will know that he never lost his unemphatic Kansan accent despite many decades living elsewhere.) Whether you’re a fan of Stafford or not, you have to agree that in this little poem the presentation perfectly meshes with the theme. Except, perhaps, for the single bright spot in his vocabulary. His wife, that “vivid girl from the mountains” provides the necessary dramatic contrast to the speaker’s restraint, and the adjective stands out all the more starkly from the rest of the poem’s understated diction.
She asks the obvious question of her mild-mannered (some might say dull) husband: “Then why did you choose me?” His reply is a masterstroke of a two-edged non-answer:
At one level it’s simply a refusal to engage with the framing of the question, which naturally leads one to wonder why. But as he lowers his eyes (mildly, of course), it’s possible to take that gesture as embarrassment. But embarrassment at what? At being caught out in a blatant contradiction? And perhaps at his own lack of concern over it? At his wife’s apparent obtuseness? At his own inability to articulate his feelings? Or perhaps an unwillingness?
Which leads in turn to looking again at the phrase “admirable people.” At first blush, he’s making a critique, or at least a description, of his wife, and it is an affectionate if somewhat bland characterization. But mightn’t the phrase refer equally well to himself? Or even to all people of good will? Perfectly admirable people often are confused, and it’s no reflection on their intelligence or worth. When I’ve read that last line in public, it’s often provoked a smile, no doubt because we’ve all been there, trying to explain something that seems obvious to us but not to someone we love.
Your reading of the poem may differ. But personally, I think all the above possibilities are kept in suspension by the poet, in his understated way; and all may carry some degree of aptness to the situation. It’s up to the reader to decide, ultimately. The poet is simply not going to try to explain the mysteries of attraction and affection involved here. They cannot be explained, finally, not without considerable reductiveness. One might even say that Stafford is displaying some Negative Capability here.
And that’s my longwinded answer, or nonanswer, to my most admirable—and quite vivid—friend Marilyn.
By the way, I recommend memorizing that final line. I find it’s a good way to disengage from pointless arguments with loved ones or friends, and to do so without undue rancor.
Before proceeding further, I’d best remind myself and you just what Keats wrote, in an 1817 letter to his brothers George and Tom. In the process of describing a “disquisition” he had had with an acquaintance, he reports:
. . . several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. . . This pursued through Volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great Poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
And that’s about it for his theory. (By the way, speaking of irritations, rather than putting a “[sic]” after every time Keats employs the generic “Man,” I invite you to imagine a word like “Person” in its place.)
Scholars have pointed out that this renowned passage seems to connect with an idea Keats had floated in an earlier letter, to the effect that “Men of Genius” (as opposed to “Men of Power”) are distinguished by their lack of “individuality” and “any determined Character.” That’s where Shakespeare comes in, as the ultimate genius. Why? For erasing his own individuality in favor of that of his characters. These characters speak often with eloquence and force, but we have little idea what their author truly thought about the ideas that they explore. In his plays, via his fictional creations, Shakespeare certainly expresses mysteries, uncertainties, and doubts as well as any author ever has, but he nowhere articulates settled opinions of his own. I take it that this is part of what Keats means when he asserts that for a great poet “the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.” Hamlet or Macbeth may be psychological or moral messes, and their tragedies don’t convey any clear “message,” much less an uplifting one. Yet the plays bearing their names are sheer Beauty. It is a highly Romantic attitude, obviously, this foregrounding of the aesthetic and intuitive over all matters practical, logical, and systematic—which “men of power” presumably excel at.
Like most either/or formulations, this polarity between Genius and Power seems a big oversimplification. But I confess that to the extent that I lean in one direction, I have always found the Romantic side of the aisle more comfortable than its opposite. In other words, I’m with Keats, Whitman, and other Romantic poets in finding the world around me rich in mystery, uncertainty, and doubt. I feel the deep attractions of dream, intuition, myth, emotional intelligence, and so on, while being skeptical that reason and logic alone can take us where we need to go. For a poem is not primarily an essay or an argument but a work of art. Accordingly I believe that contradiction and ambiguity and ambivalence are frequently required in order to do justice in a poem to the messy complexities of any self-aware, honest reckoning. In this regard, I’ve frequently quoted my favorite definition of poetry, Auden’s “clear expression of mixed feelings.” That’s not the whole story, by a long shot, but it does point to a quality I deeply admire in much of the poetry I love most, Keats’s definitely included.
Reason itself is not necessarily very good at addressing some crucial matters of moral or emotional intelligence, is it? After all, it was the Age of Reason that inspired our founding fathers to adopt high-minded positions about Natural Rights, Freedom, and Liberty, while at the same time allowing them to use rational arguments to reconcile such lofty notions with their continued support of slavery, Native American genocide, and male supremacy. Such patriots and enlightened thinkers as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and even Benjamin Franklin were slave owners. Pure emotion can be unhinged and confusing, to be sure, but pure reason can be heartless. That may be an oversimplification, but one containing more than a kernel of truth.
So to the extent that I gave it much thought, for a long time I believed that at least part of Keats’s skepticism about “facts and reason” was quite sensible, having to do with the inherent limitations of rationalism and utilitarian philosophy. And realizing that there is something beyond the purely rational in any art I have ever deeply loved.
Then along came my friend Marilyn McCabe, who has written a couple astringent blog posts on the subject of Negative Capability, which quite usefully plunged me into new uncertainties and doubts, while prodding me to take a fresh look at some of the mysteries I’ve largely taken for granted.
McCabe’s blog, which you should follow if you don’t already (find it here: marilynonaroll.wordpress.com), regularly offers brief, provocative ruminations on poetry, art, and creativity, all expressed with her trademark humor and attitude. The title of a post from 25 July 2016 puts her thesis on Negative Capability in a nifty nutshell: “Keats Pisses Me Off; or the Beauty of Fact and Reason; or Art and Reaching, Irritably.” That’s pretty clear. The entire post is brief enough that I can quote a good chunk of what she writes in developing her point:
I often think of this phrase irritatedly, as I Google after fact, and search my intelligence for the reason behind any number of seemingly unreasonable things. The situation of modern humanity is to be both in uncertainty and doubt AND reach after fact and reason, and bully for us. To seek fact and reason is a noble process . . . .
He seems to challenge the “Man of Achievement” to rest in confusion and consideration of the sublime. This is crap. Beauty, yes. I’m all for it. Can’t get enough of it. The contemplation of it is one of my favorite pastimes. But to make art, I believe we go a step beyond the consideration of the sublime.
He seems to challenge the “Man of Achievement” to rest in confusion and consideration of the sublime. This is crap. Beauty, yes. I’m all for it. Can’t get enough of it. The contemplation of it is one of my favorite pastimes. But to make art, I believe we go a step beyond the consideration of the sublime.
I’m embarrassed to admit that it hadn’t occurred to me until reading this that Keats’s praise of uncertainty and confusion is itself a bit confusingly presented, as well as radically undeveloped. And worse, that his take-down of hyper-rationality is expressed, however incompletely, in the bloodless language of rationality, not poetry. I mean, for heaven’s sake, Negative Capability—it’s as bad as Categorical Imperative, an abstract mouthful such as would intimidate any freshman in Philosophy 101. It also seems to present an irreconcilable paradox, akin to William Carlos Williams’s famous slogan, “No ideas but in things”—which, as everyone has gleefully pointed out, is an idea, not a thing. Just as Archibald MacLeish’s patronizing imperative “A poem should not mean, / but be,” in his “Ars Poetica,” is likewise self-contradictory.
So for the first time I want to ask, “John, aside from ‘not reaching irritably,’ what should I do with my uncertainties and doubts? Help!” In other words, McCabe has a good point. And as she continues I begin to see my own understanding start to clarify a bit:
The process of making art is the process of asking questions, of seeking perspective. Even the seemingly simple act of painting a purely representational landscape is an inquiry into the human act of seeing, and into how nature forms and casts color, light, and shadow. The act of writing a poem IS an act of reaching after fact and reason, goddammit. It’s the reaching that is the art. So, fuck you, Keats. Fuck off.
I agree wholeheartedly, except for the last several sentences, where I must qualify my agreements. By the way, my problem isn’t the expletives. I personally love Keats and would never tell him to fuck off, but it’s fun to challenge hero worship and knock the icons off their pedestals. Besides, his finest poems can survive any amount of his loose epistolary philosophizing. Keats remains a great poet not because of his critical theories, such as they are, but because he wrote superb poems.
Still, I believe where McCabe is headed here may provide an answer to my own belated question of Keats: what should I do with my mistrust of overly tidy rationalism? The more I think about it, the more I suspect it is not only the best answer, but perhaps the only sensible one. What we do is keep asking questions, considering every poem as an experiment, and every conclusion provisional. I suspect McCabe might concur with me on that. If this reminds anyone of the scientific method, I would agree; poetic and scientific creation share a lot. “The reaching is the art” chimes nicely with something the great Czech poet Miroslav Holub once wrote. Holub, who was a distinguished immunologist in addition to a poet, described the following lines as one of the few occasions in which he succeeded in conveying something about his laboratory life in a poem:
You ask the secret.
It has just one name:
again.
(“Ode to Joy” Translated by George Theiner)
It has just one name:
again.
(“Ode to Joy” Translated by George Theiner)
The phrase of McCabe’s I do have some trouble with is “writing a poem IS an act of reaching after fact and reason.” That way of putting it seems to me incomplete, and not a good fit with much of my own reading or practice. Of course, I should also mention that I realize her comments come from a blog post, which is by definition as exploratory as Keats’s letters. Her comments were not meant as a dissertation. Still, let me try to flesh out what I mean by way of an example or two.
The reason I don’t recognize my poetic self in “reaching after fact and reason” is because reason itself is seldom (never?) my own goal. It certainly may be one of the tools employed, along with my knowledge of poetic craft and history, and of course the countless facts supplied by my experience and reading. When I’ve tried to capsulize my sense of what my goal in writing a poem is, my best (oversimplified) nutshell is “surprise.” This is a topic I covered at some length in the May issue of this year in The Garment of Surprise. Typically when writing a poem I hope to go somewhere, imaginatively, where I have not yet been, explore some new psychic or emotional territories, or possibly just find some musical tones that I haven’t yet sounded.
While I do assuredly believe in objective reality, honor the scientific method, and appreciate it when poems are grounded in factual details, I think the mansion of poetry contains many other rooms. The issue here was nicely expressed by Whitman in his original 1855 version of “Song of Myself”:
Hurrah for positive science! Long live exact demonstration!
Fetch stonecrop and mix it with cedar and branches of lilac;
This is the lexicographer or chemist . . . . this made a grammar of the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This is the geologist, and this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.
Fetch stonecrop and mix it with cedar and branches of lilac;
This is the lexicographer or chemist . . . . this made a grammar of the old cartouches,
These mariners put the ship through dangerous unknown seas,
This is the geologist, and this works with the scalpel, and this is a mathematician.
Yes, Whitman, that arch-Romantic and Transcendentalist, was also a lover of science. In fact he relished all things modern, writing poems in praise of locomotives, photography, and other fruits of 19th Century progress. He didn’t simply emote or philosophize; and more importantly, he saw no real division between fact and spirit, body and soul, science and art. He famously boasted of his own “contradictions,” many of which I am tempted to say are shared with most of us.
Thus in the same passage he can segue directly from his paean to “positive science” and “exact demonstration” to this necessary qualification, addressed to the chemists, grammarians, surgeons, geologists and other lovers of fact and reason:
Gentlemen I receive you, and attach and clasp hands with you,
The facts are useful and real . . . . they are not my dwelling . . . . I enter by them to an
area of the dwelling.
The facts are useful and real . . . . they are not my dwelling . . . . I enter by them to an
area of the dwelling.
This combination gets close to my own feelings on the subject. The facts are useful indeed, and of course real, but “they are not my dwelling.” Not in a poem, anyway. Ideally, my own poetic dwelling contains and builds on facts and reason, but may also contain dream, mystery, intuition, and when necessary paradox, contradiction, ambivalence, and so on. Why? Simply because that’s life, to put it as reductively as Keats did.
I like Frost’s summary of his aim for poems, which was to achieve “a momentary stay against confusion.” His explanation in “The Figure a Poem Makes” of how a poem comes to be is worth quoting more fully:
It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.
I hope this does not seem like mere hair-splitting, but when writing a poem I am not reaching after fact and reason, per se; rather, I am inclining to the impulse, following my intuitive instincts, and hoping for that momentary stay against confusion. A great many drafts, in fact most of them, do not succeed in achieving that, but it remains my goal.
The same seems true of many of the poems by others that I love most. I have learned many things from reading poems, including all sorts of wonderful facts. But the ones that strike me most deeply typically leave some loose ends, some ambiguity or ambivalence, some question, even some mystery. This is true even of some very short and simple poems, ones I would not argue are masterpieces, but which do seem to be ones that Keats, Whitman, or Frost might appreciate. I’ll conclude with a simple one by William Stafford that is short enough to look at whole:
Passing Remark
In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don't like much to happen.
In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.
My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, "Then why did you choose me?"
Mildly I lower my brown eyes—
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.
The Rescued Year. Harper & Row, 1966.
In scenery I like flat country.
In life I don't like much to happen.
In personalities I like mild colorless people.
And in colors I prefer gray and brown.
My wife, a vivid girl from the mountains,
says, "Then why did you choose me?"
Mildly I lower my brown eyes—
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.
The Rescued Year. Harper & Row, 1966.
Nothing unclear about this odd little love poem, certainly. The vocabulary is simple, images deliberately generic, descriptive details sparsely deployed. The tone itself, with maybe one exception, befits the theme by remaining flat as Kansas. (Those who heard the late poet give a reading will know that he never lost his unemphatic Kansan accent despite many decades living elsewhere.) Whether you’re a fan of Stafford or not, you have to agree that in this little poem the presentation perfectly meshes with the theme. Except, perhaps, for the single bright spot in his vocabulary. His wife, that “vivid girl from the mountains” provides the necessary dramatic contrast to the speaker’s restraint, and the adjective stands out all the more starkly from the rest of the poem’s understated diction.
She asks the obvious question of her mild-mannered (some might say dull) husband: “Then why did you choose me?” His reply is a masterstroke of a two-edged non-answer:
Mildly I lower my brown eyes—
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.
there are so many things admirable people do not understand.
At one level it’s simply a refusal to engage with the framing of the question, which naturally leads one to wonder why. But as he lowers his eyes (mildly, of course), it’s possible to take that gesture as embarrassment. But embarrassment at what? At being caught out in a blatant contradiction? And perhaps at his own lack of concern over it? At his wife’s apparent obtuseness? At his own inability to articulate his feelings? Or perhaps an unwillingness?
Which leads in turn to looking again at the phrase “admirable people.” At first blush, he’s making a critique, or at least a description, of his wife, and it is an affectionate if somewhat bland characterization. But mightn’t the phrase refer equally well to himself? Or even to all people of good will? Perfectly admirable people often are confused, and it’s no reflection on their intelligence or worth. When I’ve read that last line in public, it’s often provoked a smile, no doubt because we’ve all been there, trying to explain something that seems obvious to us but not to someone we love.
Your reading of the poem may differ. But personally, I think all the above possibilities are kept in suspension by the poet, in his understated way; and all may carry some degree of aptness to the situation. It’s up to the reader to decide, ultimately. The poet is simply not going to try to explain the mysteries of attraction and affection involved here. They cannot be explained, finally, not without considerable reductiveness. One might even say that Stafford is displaying some Negative Capability here.
And that’s my longwinded answer, or nonanswer, to my most admirable—and quite vivid—friend Marilyn.
By the way, I recommend memorizing that final line. I find it’s a good way to disengage from pointless arguments with loved ones or friends, and to do so without undue rancor.
© 2021 David Graham
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